Content platforms provide a platform where users may share and consume content. Content platforms monitor content related to users and notify users when content is ready to be consumed. For example, content platforms may notify a user when the user has pending content items in their feed, pending invitations to connect with other users, and any other content item update that may be of interest to the user. Notifications are sent to users to inform users of the pending content. In response, users may initiate a new user session on the content platform to interact with pending content.
Content platforms dedicate significant resources to generating and sending notifications to users in order to cause users to engage with the content platform by initiating a new user session. Content platforms may optimize when notifications are sent to users based upon many factors such as the amount of pending content for the user and the frequency in which the user engages in a user session. Metrics for such factors allow content platforms to schedule notification messages in order to maximize the probability that a user will initiate a new user session. However, initiating a new user session does not guarantee that the new user session results in quality user engagements. User sessions may include very short sessions, where a user engages in few (if any) activities and may only be online for a few seconds, or longer sessions, where a user engages in many different activities and the session lasts for several minutes. Shorter user sessions may not result in the level of engagement desired by the content platform. Also, shorter sessions are a sign of user dissatisfaction in the content platform. Therefore, conventional approaches to optimize notifications to increase the probability of a new user session may not result in the desired effect of increasing user engagement.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.